I'm thinking about making a four player game, not really time intensive, but i hate the BASIC link functionality. I found a linkport tutorial here, but it's for the ti 83, in which a link between more than two players is impossible. However, in the ti 84, there is a usb and an I/O port. How would my program distinguish between the two ports?

there is no way to distinguish between them in BASIC, and in assembly nobody has managed to make a link game using the USB yet, as it is a lot more complicated than using the IO

My suggestion is to not make a 4 player calculator game. If the calc at the end needed to send information to the calc at the other end, the information would have to pass through 2 other calculators, to get there. Each packet of information would have to have a tag to tell the receiving calculator who its coming from, where its going, and the data itself. And since the IO port can only handle 4 different states at once (with complications) it would be extremely difficult to get everything to work properly

If you're planning this in BASIC, your out of luck, as there is no way to tell the difference between IO and USB, and furthermore, the sending calculator must be Paused. For each calculator to receive a single data packet from every other calculator would require so much sending, getCalc-ing, and pausing that it would be useless, if not impossible.

Well, yes, I know about BASIC getcalc(, and yes, you can, in fact, specify which port in the arguments, but because of the whole "power-saving state" business, I read up on the assembly usage. Oh, i forgot to mention that, i thought it was implied. But yea, there are no assembly tutorials for the ti 84 at all on anything…(hardware clock? usb link?)

So USB would be different than I/O, not using white/red wires, or tip/ring? I didn't imagine that. How do USBs work?